This article explores the representation of unaccompanied minor asylum seekers as a distinct form of work, undertaken at the frontline of the Norwegian asylum system. Inspired by institutional ethnography, we examine the nature of this work from the standpoint of representatives in Norway and through regulatory texts defining their role and responsibilities. In the analysis, we show how the textual definitions and delineations of representation do not always overlap neatly with either what representatives do or what they feel they should be doing. Conceptualising the work of representatives as a type of frontline work, we identify a tension between a need to be active, doing work to activate rights, and an institutional message encouraging the representatives to act passively. This illustrates the difficulties of doing representational work, with potential consequences for the minors whose rights and well-being are at stake.

This article offers a critical, intersectional reflection on disability advocacy, grounded in the lived experience of a disabled Black woman navigating ableist employment structures and institutional neglect within UK public sector governance. Written from the author's standpoint as a disabled Black woman based in the UK higher education and public policy sphere, it draws from personal archives and direct action including correspondence with state equality bodies to unpack the racialised, gendered, and bureaucratic dimensions of access failure. Adopting an autoethnographic approach rooted in Black feminist methodologies and disability justice frameworks, the article resists presenting personal experience as anecdotal. Instead, it positions such lived accounts as political evidence of how race, disability, gender, and structural power converge to produce compounded exclusions. Framed by feminist disability justice, epistemic injustice, and critiques of institutional performativity, the piece interrogates how diversity discourses can simultaneously acknowledge and neutralise dissent. It examines the emotional and material toll of being repeatedly unheard, the exhaustion of procedural compliance, and the persistent refusal to be co-opted by tokenistic narratives of inclusion. This is both a critique and a survival offering a call for collective reimagining of access not as a compliance task but as a political and ethical imperative. In doing so, the article contributes to wider debates on structural accountability, the sustainability of activist labour, and access as a demand forged through resistance rather than bestowed by institutions.

Despite the promise of the NHS being open to all, charging regulations and policy for non-UK citizens have been introduced. This article reports an analysis of policies and parliamentary debates linked to the UK's Immigration Health Surcharge. We use Bacchi's ‘what's the problem represented to be’ approach to understand how migrants and their healthcare access are represented and problematised within current health policy and related parliamentary debates. Core problem formulations relate to historic over-generosity of the NHS to migrants and overseas visitors; a lack of fairness in contributions to the NHS by British taxpayers compared to migrants; and a threat to the NHS's long-term sustainability due to migrants’ and overseas visitors’ misuse. This represents migrants as a financial drain on the NHS and, consequently, a risk to its continuation. Together, the problem formulations produce a justification and rationale for the Immigration Health Surcharge and its subsequent increases.

Discussions about 'economic migrants' within mainstream media and politics in the UK tend to operate within a morally troubling framing. One dominant view is that a great many asylum seekers are really 'economic migrants' seeking illegitimate access to the UK's economic resources. Those who object to assertions of this kind generally do so by refutation, insisting that asylum seekers are legitimately fleeing persecution and are wronged by the widespread scepticism. In their focus on 'legitimacy', they exclude discussion of those who do migrate partly or wholly to meet their basic material needs. Taken together, these positions marginalise necessitous economic migrants and have serious consequences for health policy, adversely affecting migrants’ access to essential healthcare. In this paper I critically examine this prevailing discourse and urge scholars of health and migration to destabilise it by recognising poverty as a central determinant of both health and migration. I offer arguments for foregrounding necessitous economic migrants in our interventions regarding migration and health, and contend that doing so would make for a more just and ultimately more persuasive way of speaking about necessitous migration as a whole.

This study examines the lived experiences of food insecurity and volunteer work in a Portuguese solidarity restaurant using a reflexive autoethnographic approach based on two years of participant observation. Situating personal narratives within the frameworks of stigma, care ethics, and emotional labour, it explores the moral dilemmas, affective demands, and power dynamics inherent in food aid work. Findings reveal persistent tensions between institutional control and relational care, as volunteers navigate compassion, rule enforcement, and ethical discomfort. These dynamics are conceptualised in the Tension Triangle Model of Food Aid Work, which maps the interplay between institutional expectations, volunteer emotional burden, and recipient agency. Recipients, in turn, manage stigma, resist dependency, and assert dignity within constrained aid systems. By employing a reflexive, first-person methodology, this study challenges dominant narratives of humanitarian aid, exposing the emotional and structural complexities of caregiving and the unintended hierarchies embedded in voluntary work. It advocates for dignity-centred, ethically grounded approaches to food assistance that move beyond paternalism and toward inclusive, justice-oriented support.

While worker cooperatives aim to achieve both solidaristic and social goals, there is less understanding of how the democratic structure of worker cooperatives interacts with an inclusive work environment among differently motivated and empowered workers. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring how democratic arrangements in the workplace contribute to the inclusion of marginalised workers through an analysis of Worker Co-ops in Japan—a network of worker cooperatives with roots in a job-creation movement by unemployed workers which has expanded in the realm of care. The study shows how Worker Co-ops have reinterpreted democracy as a cooperative practice of institutionalising the relational conditions for drawing out the perspectives of others and provides insights into how this also enables them collectively to resist dominant societal narratives that contribute to their marginalisation.

This themed section explores the lived experiences, perspectives, agency, and proposals of those systematically positioned at the ‘margins’ of social policy frameworks in Japan and South Korea. The articles focus on the cases of marginalised workers, providers of community care services, and female migrant workers. Employing the lens of structural injustice, the study highlights how these groups have been disadvantaged within the productivist and familial institutional structures of the two countries. The ‘margins’ in these countries have been occupied by people outside of the core employment relationship, such as atypical workers and those performing unpaid or poorly supported care work. Although similar marginalisation occurs globally, disadvantages have concentrated more acutely on these groups in Japan and Korea due to limited decommodification and defamilialisation persisting until recent decades. The articles provide insights into how structurally marginalised people can draw on their unique experiences and perspectives to reflect on existing injustices and potentially to catalyse social change. In the face of increasing labour market precarity and rising demands for care, the studies of this themed section have implications for social policy challenges in work and care beyond the region.

Japan's Technical Intern Trainee Program (TITP) can be considered as a temporary labour migrant programme (TLMP), which prohibits migrant workers from bringing family members with them. This study explores how such a ban leads to the regulation of workers’ reproductive practices and rights, either explicitly or implicitly. Moreover, drawing on documents related to trials, interviews, and other information associated with the judicial cases involving TITP workers giving birth in isolation, this study examines how their reproductive citizenship was claimed through the lens of ‘interactive need interpretation’ among the migrant women, migrant rights organisations and individuals supporting the workers. It argues that the interactions between those in structurally different positions offer critical insights into the structural injustice of the TITP and temporary labour migrant programmes.

This study examines the development of the social economy in South Korea, focusing on the experiences of marginalised informal social service providers that have newly incorporated as social economy organisations (SEOs) through top-down government policies. Drawing on in-depth interviews with organisers of new SEOs as well as other related actors, the study explores their motivations, challenges, and newly constructed values. While extant studies on the social economy in Korea characterise it as government-led or highlight how already politicised social economy actors resist against the state and market, this study shows how even top-down policies can catalyse the self-awareness of marginalised actors by bringing into focus the contradictions between government expectations and their lived experiences. This leads them to reinterpret their roles in ways that transcend government intentions.